All you gotta do is turn and run, he thought as he kept inching forward, now within ten feet of dinner. Then he cursed himself for jinxing his chances. As if the rat god had heard his worshipper’s prayer, the lighter sputtered and went out.
He cursed again, this time aloud, re-lit the lighter, and saw the rat hurrying away from him. He rushed after it and the lighter went out again, just as it reached the adjoining tunnel. He arrived two seconds later, fumbled to ignite the flame, and saw only a tunnel fading into darkness. The rat was gone, its trance broken when the lighter failed, and he sat down disconsolately on the wet ground. He’d blown his chance.
Then something infinitely worse happened. He heard laughter coming from behind him. He turned quickly to see a face he’d seen many years before. It was much older now, the skin drooping slightly and more lined, the silvery beard longer than it had been, but it was unmistakably the face of Bill Soames, the notorious serial killer whose face been displayed on the giant Subboard in the city so far above, when he’d become SUIC inmate number one, some thirty years ago.
CHAPTER THREE
“THIS IS YOUR FAULT. This is all your damn fault.” Forty stood, hands on hips, surveying the scene in front of him. Thinking, trying to figure out a solution to what was undoubtedly a disastrous turn of events. It didn’t matter that you needed a brain for thinking, and as far as Thirty-Nine was concerned, Forty didn’t seem to have one.
He should know, too, because he’d been forced to partner him for almost five years. Leader had always, or for as long as he’d been down here, had Gang work in pairs. He’d never thought about why that might be but now, as he watched Forty trying to shift a rock that was almost as big as him, he could think of nothing else.
Strange, really. The only tunnel around the Gypsum Chamber was completely blocked, which meant they were trapped back here, and it was now, only now, that his brain had decided to focus in on why Leader sent his men out to work in twos.
Was it because he didn’t want gangs within Gang? Did he think they might rebel if a group of them got together and discussed his orders and ideas?
“You got nothing to say?” Forty gave up with the rock and snatched the lighter from his hand. “Or are you just gonna stand there and do nothing, like a dumb freak?”
“What do you want me to say?” Now that he could see they were doomed, he felt strangely calm. He didn’t want to die, but he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to live, either. Five years was a long time to spend underground, especially when you had a dipshit like Forty as your partner.
“I’m sorry, perhaps.” Forty turned and began to search for gaps in the heaped rock, holding the lighter close to the collapse zone.
“I don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
“Oh yeah?” Forty marched back to him and shoved him, hard.
“Yeah,” Thirty-Nine replied and, without thinking, punched Forty in the face.
It had taken him five years to do what he’d wanted to do the day he’d met the arrogant, self-centered fool, but doing it brought him to his senses. As Forty stumbled back and crashed into the heap of broken rock that had once been the ceiling of their route past the Gypsum Chamber, the shock subsided, and he was filled with horror.
They couldn’t move the rock, and there were no air holes this far in. If they couldn’t get past the Gypsum Chamber, they would likely suffocate.
“What are we going to do?” He fell to his knees beside Forty and began trying to pull the rock away, scrabbling desperately, tearing his nails without registering the pain. After five minutes, he gave up and slumped next to Forty.
Forty remained silent, rubbing his jaw. The sight of him, sitting there among the pieces of broken rock, feeling sorry for himself, annoyed him. Why hadn’t he fought back when he punched him? Why hadn’t he retaliated, defended himself? Or at least called him out for breaking Leader’s rule, the one about not bringing violence against Gang unless told to do so by him?
He looked up. Above their heads, a slab of rock sat atop another, forming a T-shape. The top portion had begun to vibrate when Forty crashed into the rubble beneath it. His digging had resulted in its momentum increasing, and now it had begun to seesaw. Thirty-Nine scrabbled away.
If it tipped and hit Forty, it would undoubtedly kill him. He rushed forward, and Forty cowered, he actually cowered, from him.
“Come on, get up. You can’t stay there.” He offered his hand, bloodied from his desperate attempts to dig. Forty slapped it away.
“Leave me the fuck alone.”
In his peripheral vision, he saw the rock begin to tilt. He took a step back, leaned forward, and dragged Forty away, gripping him by the ankles, just before the rock crashed down. He’d punched him, sure, but he’d saved his life too, and that was what Gang was all about: backing each other up, letting Leader do the thinking, being a brother to the man you were paired with.
Even brothers fought, but they still looked out for one another when the chips were down. It was the reason he’d joined Gang six months into his life (or was it death?) sentence. He couldn’t have survived this place alone. He’d needed the security of belonging to something. In fact, he still did.
“I’m sorry I hit you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, man, I just freaked out. It won’t happen again.”
Forty didn’t reply. Instead, he got to his feet, still nursing his bruised jaw and his bruised ego.
“What are we going to do? If we stay here, we’ll die.” Something about saying it out loud made it seem even worse.
Forty shrugged. “We’ll have to go through the Gypsum Chamber.”
There was no hope or optimism in his voice when he delivered his verdict, and Thirty-Nine knew why. It was madness, sheer madness, to attempt traveling through the Gypsum Chamber. When Leader had decided he wanted walls built around his compound, he’d sent men in to harvest the gypsum. Twenty-five of them, working just inside the chamber, chipping away at the huge crystals. He’d gotten his walls, but fifteen of the men had died. In twenty-four hours. They’d been less than thirty feet inside the chamber. He had no idea how big the place was, but he felt his stomach clench when he thought about going in there. It was so hot that you couldn’t sweat, that fluid would build up in your lungs until eventually you passed out and were boiled alive.
It was such a bad idea that Leader, a man obsessed with honoring his fallen men with decent burials, had left the bodies of the fifteen men to rot in there. He’d done so with a heavy heart, even using the last of his gypsum to have likenesses carved of the men (and then having the sculptor killed because he said they looked nothing like the heroes who’d given their lives to ensure his safety).
What other choice did they have? He didn’t have to think about it, he knew the answer.
If they wanted to live, they had to do it. If they wanted to find their way back to Leader’s compound, they had to take the risk.
“If we make it back,” Thirty-Nine said, “what do you think Leader will say when we tell him we couldn’t find Fifty-Eight?”
“We don’t tell him.”
“What?”
“I said we don’t tell him. If we tell him, he might send us back to look for him. There’s no way I’m going through the Gypsum Chamber twice.”
“We’ll be lucky if we get through once.” He tried to take the lighter back from Forty, but he dodged out of reach and the lighter went out. Forty sparked it back into life and began babbling, trying to justify himself.
“I mean, I feel bad about lying to him, about breaking the rules, but I’m scared, okay? I was never scared down here before, but I am now. I’d sooner take my chances in the Cotton Cave with the plague than in the Gypsum Chamber.”
With that, the two men headed away from the blocked tunnel, Thirty-Nine switching to Forty’s other side when he saw a large rat ahead of them. He was scared too. But, unlike Forty, he’d always been scared down in the SUIC. That was the reason he’d joined Gang in the first place. Now
, he wondered if pledging blind allegiance to Leader was going to be what cost him his life, and he wondered if today was the day he would lose it.
SOAMES SHOOK HIS HEAD from side to side, his long, silvery hair flicking left and right. He was looking down, frowning. Gabe had thrust the sharp-edged, tapered rock out in front of him. The hand that held it shook violently.
“You should put that thing down. I’m not your enemy.”
A strange thing for this sociopath, this sadist, this predator, to say. This was the demon of Gabe’s childhood nightmares. Shadows dipped in and out of the lines on his face, the lighter casting an orange glow that wasn’t quite bright enough to fully unmask the man in front of him. It was Soames though, of that he was certain.
“I know who you are.” Gabe’s voice came in a whisper, his mind trawling through the 3D map it had made of his surroundings, trying to figure out the best way to flee.
“You think you know who I was.” Soames took two steps toward him and spoke in a low, confidential tone. “I’d feel better talking with the light off. You think you could put the lighter away, Gabe?”
He took a step back, staring into the dark, brooding eyes of a man who’d killed more than forty men and women. “How do you know my name?”
“It pays to know, down here.”
When he took another step, Gabe didn’t move. Instead, his eyes went to the rockknife in his hand, then back to those dark eyes, the sclera almost as dark as the pupil, the intentions impossible to guess.
“Go away from me. I’m not afraid of you.” He knew his body language said the opposite, that he was terrified, that he wanted to turn and run, but that he was frozen in place.
“Relax, please. I’m not who you think I am.” He smiled then, and Gabe was surprised to see that he still had all his teeth, at least, all his front ones. But his statement provoked a sudden burst of anger.
“You’re Bill Soames. You killed forty people. You’re the guy everyone fears down here, never mind up there.” He flicked his chin at the rock above him.
Soames’s eyes narrowed. “Well, I prefer William, but that’s okay. No hard feelings. And actually, it was closer to fifty, if you want to talk numbers, but I had my reasons.”
“Reasons?”
“I never took the life of anyone who didn’t deserve it, and I never, ever messed up. If I killed you, you deserved to be killed.” Soames nodded as he spoke, and Gabe wondered which of them he was trying to convince.
He took a second to think before answering. “Things were bad enough up there, without people taking the law into their own hands. Murder can’t be justified, same way rape can’t.”
“Hold up. I never raped anyone.” There had been a hint of a smile on his face, but the mention of rape made it disappear. Gabe felt good about that, felt like he’d scored a point.
“You stabbed and strangled and burned them. Those things are worse than rape.”
He didn’t believe his declaration that the people he’d killed deserved it. It was a grandiose thing to say, a self-centered thing. Something someone with a god-complex would say. Something a serial killer would say.
“There was no law, not practically at least, not after the war ended. There was no such thing as civilized society by 2120, only predators and prey. The laws were written down, sure, they were there on paper, but they weren’t enforced. Society needed a man like me. You don’t know how bad it was, you were just a child then.”
“You made yourself a predator to avoid becoming prey, is that it?” He edged away, the rockknife held stiffly in front of him, his body side-on to Soames to make a smaller target of himself.
Soames shook his head. “No. I made myself a predator to stop the weak becoming prey. I couldn’t help them all, but I did my best for those I could. The people I killed, they were the predators. Super-predators, you could say. You know I was a police officer, don’t you?”
“You were?” This information surprised Gabe. He’d known the man in front of him had killed dozens of people, known it had taken them a long time to catch him, but he didn’t know that was because he was a cop, with the means to cover his tracks. The revelation sickened him even more.
“Uh-huh. Lot of people forget that, paint me as the worst villain to ever walk the earth, but I saw and heard a lot of things because of my position. Every cop out there knew who the bad guys were, but we were told to wait for the SUIC to be completed before we arrested them. They wanted people to send down here, see? But I couldn’t wait. When I saw cartels depriving people of food, I killed the bosses. People who took in children orphaned by the war just to have a plaything to abuse, they had to go. Corrupt cops were the worst offenders of all, but they were harder to get to. They were supposed to help people, not make things worse for them.” He shook his head ruefully, thinking, Gabe supposed, of cops he knew that had done very bad things and still walked free above ground. None of their crimes could be as bad as the ones Soames had committed. Then a thought came to him. He’d said he’d killed abusers, people who did bad things to children. What if he’d known what Bodge’s mother was allowing her boyfriends to do to him? Would he have killed her and saved Bodge the fear and misery of the SUIC?
Soames continued. “The World Alliance was too busy digging a hole in the ground to put criminals in, while the criminals were having a party. They thought they were moving toward making things better up there, but inaction helps no one. People who were starving, kids who were being abused, they couldn’t wait. They needed help right there and then, and I helped them. That’s the simple truth of it.”
There was sorrow in his eyes, and he turned away, placing a hand on the hot wall and bending slightly, breathing deeply. A lengthy period of silence passed between the two men, as Gabe sized him up, wondering if this was a sign of weakness, or a trick to coax him closer, to make him lower his guard.
“You weren’t afraid of being sent down here?”
“I’ve never been afraid of this place. What scared me was watching society being torn apart, so I sacrificed myself to try to make a difference. I don’t expect thanks for it, but I don’t want you to think I’m some sort of a devil, either.” He stood straight and tall once more, seemingly over whatever had affected him. “The planet was lucky to survive the war, and they say there were only one billion people left once they got done dropping nukes on one another, you know that?”
“I know history, yes, but ten years went by after the war before you started killing. Things were getting better.”
“Wrong, things were getting worse. I saw it every day, what people did to one another. But that doesn’t matter to you or me, not now we’re under the ground. You’re conditioned to fear me, but I haven’t taken a life since I was sent here, and I don’t want your life. If I wanted to hurt you, I’d have done it already. I’ve been following you for the past hour.”
Gabe’s head whirled. This man, called the Executioner by the misery-hungry press of the post-Cascade days, lauded on social media by twisted minds, was saying he’d had noble reasons for his murders. A string of copycat killings had taken place after he’d been caught, leading many to speculate that someone else was the guilty party, that Soames was a scapegoat. Those crimes had eventually been traced to a collective on a social media platform who idolized Soames. They’d decided to have a competition, playing at being the serial killer, seeing who could come up with the most original way to kill a person. The World Alliance had tried to shut down social media, thinking it too dangerous a tool, too full of warped minds and propaganda to be allowed to exist in a society so shattered. But some figured out how to hook into orbiting satellites, and social media remained, society kept unraveling, despite men like Soames being banished from it.
While he’d been thinking, Soames had taken two more steps. Now, he bent forward, reached over the rockknife, and plucked the lighter from his hand.
“You’re not Gang. So, indulge me. How did you manage to get your hands on this?”
“I found it.”
Gabe could hear the whumping of his heartbeat in his voice when he spoke. The old man had been lightning-fast in his approach, but he’d taken the lighter, not the rockknife, away from Gabe.
“Ah, you heard an explosion and took a dead man’s light.”
“No, that’s not true.” He felt color rising in his cheeks.
Soames tugged at his long beard, which reached halfway down his chest. “Well, whatever’s true, whether you found it or took it from one of Leader’s fools, it’s yours now.”
He handed the lighter back. Gabe, too surprised to speak, stared into the flame, wondering just what the hell was going on.
“You can’t always judge a man by his past, that’s all I’m trying to say. I had the chance to take a life once down here, and I should have taken that chance. I didn’t, and that’s why I’m standing here in front of you now.”
Soames reached out to his right. His hand disappeared into a cavity in the tunnel wall, and Gabe held the makeshift knife at chest height, readying himself in case Soames produced a weapon and tried to attack him. Something very strange was happening and, right now, he didn’t know whether to stay or run. Soames had to be seventy-five years old. He should easily be able to outpace him, but he didn’t want to get lost and separated from Bodge, not when he’d promised to look after him.
Soames removed his hand from the cavity and held out a bottle, identical to the one shoved into Gabe’s waistband except for one difference: it was full.
“Here, drink some water.”
Only now he saw it did he understand how much his body craved it. He was dehydrated, making mistakes. He’d been walking in circles, drawing attention to himself, like an inexperienced hiker, Soames the mountain lion silently tracking his every move. Maybe he was lucky it was Soames who’d been following him, and not Gang. Gang would have already beaten him to death for the lighter and the bottle.
“Take it, it’s not a trick.”
Soames placed the bottle at his feet, turned, and walked ten feet down the tunnel. He stood with his back to Gabe. “See, I’m not trying to distract you so I can attack you. I know that’s what you’re thinking, but you’re being paranoid.” He put a hand against the wall again as he spoke. With his other, he pounded on his chest, then spat onto the ground.
Two Miles Down Page 7